Canada’s top soldier in Afghanistan Sacked.
May 30, 2010

War criminal Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay leaves the Canadian HQ in Kandahar with sacked Brig.-Gen. Daniel Ménard
Canada’s top soldier in Afghanistan, Brigadier-General Daniel Ménard, has been dismissed from command following allegations he had an intimate relationship with a member of his staff, violating the military’s rules on personal relationships in the field. This had “caused Commander CEFCOM (Canadian Expeditionary Forces Command) to lose confidence in Brig.-Gen Menard’s capacity to command,”
Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and civilian employees, including journalists embedded alongside them, must follow very strict rules governing behaviour with each other. No intimate personal relationships are allowed in theatre, including those involving married couples deployed at the same time.
“Sexual activity or any other form of intimate contact in any context with another individual is prohibited anywhere in the Joint Task Force Afghanistan Area of Operations,” according to theatre standing orders governing personal relationships.
Lieutenant-General Marc Lessard, commander of Canadian forces overseas, made the announcement Saturday, a few days after Brig.-Gen. Ménard returned to Kandahar from a three-week leave.
Brigadier-General Daniel Ménard was involved in another incident on March 25, 2010 whereby his assault rifle unexpectedly went off at Kandahar Airfield.
The commander of Canadian troops in Afghanistan was being investigated after his assault rifle unexpectedly went off at Kandahar Airfield. Ménard said he was loading his C8 carbine at Kandahar Airfield on March 25, something he said he has done thousands of times, when it went off. No one was injured and nothing was damaged, but the National Defence Act makes it an offence to accidentally discharge a weapon. The general routinely travels outside of the wire, visiting troops at forward bases. If it’s found to be an accidental discharge, Menard would face an automatic court martial.
Brig.-Gen. Menard has in the past strongly objected to the US policy of taking an area and then leaving. He has said that he will not take an area without holding it. Canada’s top general in Afghanistan predicted that the Taliban will be marginalized from most of Kandahar’s population by the time the Canadian military mission ends in 2011.
Brig.-Gen. Daniel Menard said that with more than 5,000 Canadian and U.S. soldiers under his command, coalition forces will be able to hold areas in the violent province far more effectively than in recent years.
“What I can do is marginalize the insurgency in our area and they can become irrelevant to 85% of the population of Kandahar province,” Brig.-Gen. Menard said when asked what he could achieve before Canadian troops are scheduled to leave Afghanistan in the summer of 2011.
“This is what I think I can certainly achieve.”
In some parts of Kandahar, Canadian soldiers have secured terrain only to see the areas slip back under Taliban influence. Brig.-Gen. Menard had vowed to reverse this trend now that the number of forces in the region has grown.
Beyond the rhetoric and rules on personal relationships smoke screen
The personal relationship reason for sacking Brig.-Gen. Daniel Menard seems to be the standard, over used protocol applied to anyone the US or Canadian government wants to get rid of - for political reasons. Governments use it every time they don’t want the public to know what really happened or what’s really going on. This time around it may have been used to prevent any investigation of the March 25, 2010 incident at the Kandahar Airfield. Was it an accidental discharge? Could it be another reason? I think it would be prudent for us to look deeper. Look at what has been happening recently in Afghanistan. Look at what is suppose to happen in 2011 - the withdrawal of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Is this the first step the US government is taking to make the Canadian government change their minds and stay beyond 2011 in Afghanistan? Is Brigadier-General Daniel Ménard to be replaced by someone that will support the US war of aggression in Afghanistan and make false claims to the Canadian public about the illegal war in Afghanistan? I would look very closely at the ongoing investigation concerning the torturing of detainees at the Kandahar Airfield. By sacking Brigadier-General Daniel Ménard during an ongoing investigation the Canadian government will be obstructing justice once again by removing from command and from judicial and parliamentary oversight the one person who knows exactly happens, or has happened to Afghan detainees.
Once Canadian troops detain an Afghan suspect, largely on suspicion they are involved in insurgent activity, they look at any supporting evidence. If that isn’t sufficient, they have no choice but to quickly release him or her, Brig.-Gen. Menard claimed.
“The sole authority for this, the only authority, is me. Nobody in Canada can direct me to release anybody. Nobody. The task force commander is the authority for releasing, transferring or to keep them.”
If kept, a detainee is then subject to Canadian and NATO policy. If they are still held and not transferred after 96 hours, Brig.-Gen. Menard must contact his military superiors in Canada. If the person must be held longer, perhaps for medical reasons, the general must explain why. After that, every 24 hours, he must again justify why he is still holding a specific detainee instead of transferring him or her to Afghan authorities.
“We don’t keep people just because. It’s not a prison,” Brig.-Gen. Menard said.
Once detainees are transferred to Afghan officials, they go through the legal system. Though the evidence is supplied by Canadians, the legal system is Afghan.
“After the transfer has taken place, we have a very robust monitoring system,” said Jess Dutton, civilian director of Canada’s Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar City. “A Department of Foreign Affairs officer will interview detainees.”
What is a civilian doing in a war zone interviewing detainees? Let me explain by using the now infamous example of the Stephen Harper Conservative government involvement in committing war crimes - specifically the torturing of prisoners of war (POW). Officials from Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) were sent by the Canadian government to interrogate Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay and they gave their interrogation records to Khadr’s U.S. captors, after being told that U.S. officials had tortured Khadr (by severe sleep deprivation) for three weeks to “make him more amenable and willing to talk” to the Canadians and that he would be placed in isolation after the interrogation. The Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that the government of Canada violated Omar Khadr’s Charter rights, that those violations continue and that those violations contribute to his ongoing detention. But the Supreme Court of Canada went on to rule it appropriate to leave “it to the government to decide how best to respond…”. The Supreme Court of Canada set aside the 23 April 2009 order of the Federal Court of Canada–confirmed by the Federal Court of Appeal on 14 August 2009 - compelling the Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Commissioner of the RCMP and the Director of CSIS to “…request that the United States return Mr. Khadr to Canada as soon as practicable.”
Another Canadian cover-up to appease the US
Saturday, January 19, 2008 - An internal training manual developed by the Canadian foreign affairs department lists the United States as a country where foreigners risk torture and abuse, alongside countries such as Afghanistan, China, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Both Israel and the United States are officially allies of Canada.
The manual is a 93-page PowerPoint presentation by the Foreign Affairs Department for Canadian diplomats and was accidentally given to lawyers for the human rights group, Amnesty International.
The leak was protested by the United States ambassador. “We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries like Iran and China. Quite frankly it’s absurd,” U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins to Canada said. “For us to be on a list like that is just ridiculous.”
Canadian officials disclaimed its significance. “The document is a training manual. It is not a policy document or a statement of policy. As such it does not convey the government’s views or positions,” said Marina Wilson, spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa.
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier said the manual “contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies”, and that he “regret[s] the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department’s torture awareness training”.
Canadian Conservative Government’s Torture Cover-Up
A former Canadian Armed Forces’ interpreter has charged that Canada’s military handed over Afghan detainees whom it deemed uncooperative to the Afghan secret police so that information could be beaten out of them through torture.
Testifying before a House of Commons committee in April 2010, Ahmadshah Malgarai said he “saw Canadian military intelligence sending detainees to the NDS (Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security) when the detainees did not tell them what they expected to hear.”
“If the [Canadian] interrogator thought a detainee was lying, the military sent him to NDS for more questions, Afghan style. Translation: abuse and torture.”
Canada’s military, declared Malgarai, “used the NDS as subcontractors for abuse and torture.”
Malgarai served as a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) interpreter from June 2007 through June 2008. He worked for its counter-intelligence unit and for Brigadier General Guy Laroche, the then overall commander of the Canadian military in Afghanistan. In this position, Malgarai witnessed CAF interrogations and interaction between CAF and Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs officials and NDS officers.
There is already a mountain of evidence to show that the Canadian Conservative government and CAF ignored and suppressed warnings that prisoners transferred to Afghan security forces would be abused and tortured, making both guilty of war crimes. (Under the Geneva Conventions, it is illegal to transfer prisoners if there to is reason to suspect those to whom they are being transferred will abuse and torture them.)
Malgarai is the first participant in the Canadian military intervention in Afghanistan to charge the Canadian Conservative Government and the Canadian Armed Forces with subcontracting torture—with transferring prisoners to the NDS with the express aim of having Afghan security forces subject them to torture and abuse.
The former Canadian Armed Forces translator testified that he personally translated more than 40 documents into Pashto authorizing the transfer of Afghan detainees from the Canadian Armed Forces to the NDS. He told the Commons committee that when he asked his Canadian Armed Forces bosses, “Should I translate this as transfer for questioning or transfer for torture? They would just laugh. They were subcontracting torture.”
Malgarai insisted that “all along the chain of command” everyone “involved in any way, or at any level, with the detainee transfer” knew “what was going on and what the NDS does to the detainees.”
The day after Malgarai made his charge that the Canadian Armed Forces subcontracted torture, Paul Dewar, the foreign affairs critic for the New Democratic Party (NDP), announced that he had evidence suggesting the Canadian Armed Forces did transfer prisoners to the NDS because it judged Afghan’s secret police better able to wring information from suspects.
Dewar said he had a copy of a confidential Canadian Armed Forces report, likely from late October 2007, that recommended a batch of prisoners be transferred to the NDS because all “were deceptive and have a better knowledge on TB (Taliban) activity” than they had admitted.
Dewar declined to provide a copy of the document to the press for fear of running afoul of Canada’s national security laws.
In its campaign to disrupt and derail any investigation of the Canadian Armed Forces’ treatment of Afghan detainees, the Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has repeatedly claimed national security is at risk. This has served both to justify its refusal to provide parliament and a Military Police Complaints Commission (MPCC) inquiry uncensored documents concerning the Afghan detainee issue and to intimidate, with the threat of criminal prosecution, those who might come forward to challenge the “official story.”
Defence Minister Peter MacKay responded to Malgarai’s testimony with the now customary torrent of abuse that the Stephen Harper’s Conservative government heaps on critics of the Canadian intervention in Afghanistan, even if they are, as in the case of the opposition parties, supporters of Canada’s leading role in the Afghan war. “Our troops,” declared MacKay, “certainly deserve better than drive-by smears and unsubstantiated allegations.”
Malgarai, in his opening statement to the Commons committee, also accused the Canadian Armed Forces of having shot an unarmed 17 year-old in the head during an operation in a village north of Kandahar in June or July 2007.
Later under questioning Malgarai explained that he had not witnessed the event, but had translated the interrogations of persons detained during the same operation, read a Canadian Armed Forces intelligence report about it, and overheard the author of the report say to the head of the Canadian Armed Forces counter-intelligence unit “this is murder and we’re trying to cover it up.”
Spokesman for the Stephen Harper’s Conservative government quickly seized on the fact that Malgarai had not witnessed the shooting to claim his charge was mere hearsay.
But Malgarai’s testimony on the operation was not limited to the accusation that the Canadian Armed Forces had murdered a teenage youth. He told the Commons committee, “After the Canadian Forces wrongly killed a man, they panicked. They swept through the neighborhood, arresting people for no reason.” Those arrested, he said, included a 10 year-old boy and a crippled man of ninety.
None of the detained, said Malgarai, were Taliban, but all were nevertheless transferred to the NDS: “None did anything wrong except to be at home when the Canadian Forces murdered their neighbour. Yet Canada transferred all these innocent men to the NDS.”
Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has gone to extreme lengths to prevent parliament and the MPCC from examining the Afghan detainee issue. This has included defaming and threatening to prosecute “whistleblowers” for imperiling national security, defying a parliamentary motion that it hand all over relevant documents, and shutting down parliament for two months at the end of last year. At the same time, the Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have aggressively courted the support of military and extreme right by portraying the opposition parties as disloyal, if not quasi-treasonous, for questioning the Canadian Armed Forces’ conduct in war time.
Torture is specifically forbidden in war time Mr Harper. Article 12 of the First Geneva Convention, mandates that wounded and sick soldiers who are out of the battle should be humanely treated, and in particular should not be killed, injured, tortured, or subjected to biological experimentation. This article is the keystone of the treaty, and defines the principles from which most of the rest the treaty is derived.
Article 15 mandates that wounded and sick soldiers should be collected, cared for, and protected, though they may also become prisoners of war.
Article 3 of Third Geneva Convention has been called a “Convention in miniature.” It is the only article of the Geneva Conventions that applies in non-international conflicts. It describes minimal protections which must be adhered to by all individuals within a signatory’s territory during an armed conflict not of an international character (regardless of citizenship or lack thereof): Noncombatants, combatants who have laid down their arms, and combatants who are hors de combat (out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, including prohibition of outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. Article 3’s protections exist even if one is not classified as a prisoner of war. Article 3 also states that parties to the internal conflict should endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of GCIII.
By providing damning new evidence of the Stephen Harper’s government’s and state’s complicity in torture, Malgarai’s testimony sheds further light on the motivations behind the government’s lying, stonewalling and ever-widening attack on parliamentary norms and democratic rights.











